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Finished it. Liked it a lot. There's a strange lack of monologues in the first half of the season, which is (I suppose) thematically significant, but they come back in the second half--which is, all told, much more "typically" House of Cards than the first. Episodes 5 and 6, particularly, go to some strange-ish places, though they don't exactly handle those places as well as other shows I could name.

Oh, and I'm prepping the champagne for next season, since it looks like my predictions last year might be more right than I had hoped.

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Five episodes so far, for me. I'm enjoying this season more than the last one, too.

Although the demand Claire makes somewhere around episode three or four is so out-there loopy -- even loopier than her becoming UN ambassador -- that it kind of undermines my ability to think of her as a clear-thinking, calculating, tactically-minded whatever.

Edited March 7, 2016 by Peter T Chattaway

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The only major beef I have with this season is Doug's arc, such as it is: it makes no sense given the way last season played out. The Claire stuff I take as part of the fantasy-world the show is selling--and, since I really do want the show to end with Claire as president, I'm more than willing to give them a license to play fast-and-loose here. That's less the response of a critical thought-process and more the response of someone who loves the character to death, though, so grain of salt.

Edited March 7, 2016 by NBooth

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I liked this season, but I thought Fake Rubio/Conway was a misfire. An unconvincing character and a missed opportunity. Once again, this show fails to deliver a worthy opponent for the Underwoods. (Petrov, as always, is a delight.)

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Yeah, the last episode of this season is probably the best written/conceived of the series so far. A few reasons why spoilers below:

1. The end is entirely conceivable given that we have seen many beheadings of US citizens with the same "we don't negotiate" setup. Most of the shows political plot-twists really push against my willingness to suspend belief. But this one works very well. In fact it works too well. As a political fable, the show has woven in this bit of reality (what Zizek calls an intrusion of "the real"). It really has a chilling effect. House of Cards has converged with our timeline.

2. I like the Conway arc because it first poses Conway and wife as an inversion of Underwood and wife. Over the course of the season, we come down the other side of the Mobius Strip and the two couples become a mirror image. There is resistance on behalf of Conway's wife - but you can so clearly see the pathway the young Underwoods took together. Not sure who it is that said the extremes of both political parties connect at the edges - that our political spectrum is not a line but a loop... House of Cards gets that.

3. There is an inversion of marriage as a life-giving union. The Underwood's restored marriage is a political alliance at first, but becomes a legitimately restored relationship by the end. They experience union again. But this union flips the idea that marriage is about generation and conservation. Claire's one wistful look at the Conway boy playing in the White House is another intrusion of some kind of latent maternal instinct she forcibly abandons. The breaking of the fourth wall by both Underwoods at the very end is chilling for that reason. This is their new intimacy, their new union - which is the gestation of fear and deception.

4. The entire season did a good job of occluding its trajectory. This last episode does that at an even finer, more detailed level. None of us see this coming. Not even the Underwoods.

5. This is a pretty rote commentary on power, chaos, fear, etc... But it is really well crafted and delivered. The last two seasons did nothing for me. This one - boy howdy that was a good ending. The failure of anyone in the room to understand Arabic, which leads to the death of the hostage, is another little Zizekian detail that ties it all together.

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Also: Has Kevin Spacey gained weight? I've been a wee bit distracted by his emerging double-chin this season, to the point where, when they had a flashback to 2012, I wondered if it might become a continuity issue. But it's possible I just didn't notice during the previous seasons.

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Also: Has Kevin Spacey gained weight? I've been a wee bit distracted by his emerging double-chin this season, to the point where, when they had a flashback to 2012, I wondered if it might become a continuity issue. But it's possible I just didn't notice during the previous seasons.

I don't watch the show, but have seen House of Carbs jokes on twitter.

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Yeah, the last episode of this season is probably the best written/conceived of the series so far. A few reasons why spoilers below:

1. The end is entirely conceivable given that we have seen many beheadings of US citizens with the same "we don't negotiate" setup. Most of the shows political plot-twists really push against my willingness to suspend belief. But this one works very well. In fact it works too well. As a political fable, the show has woven in this bit of reality (what Zizek calls an intrusion of "the real"). It really has a chilling effect. House of Cards has converged with our timeline.

2. I like the Conway arc because it first poses Conway and wife as an inversion of Underwood and wife. Over the course of the season, we come down the other side of the Mobius Strip and the two couples become a mirror image. There is resistance on behalf of Conway's wife - but you can so clearly see the pathway the young Underwoods took together. Not sure who it is that said the extremes of both political parties connect at the edges - that our political spectrum is not a line but a loop... House of Cards gets that.

3. There is an inversion of marriage as a life-giving union. The Underwood's restored marriage is a political alliance at first, but becomes a legitimately restored relationship by the end. They experience union again. But this union flips the idea that marriage is about generation and conservation. Claire's one wistful look at the Conway boy playing in the White House is another intrusion of some kind of latent maternal instinct she forcibly abandons. The breaking of the fourth wall by both Underwoods at the very end is chilling for that reason. This is their new intimacy, their new union - which is the gestation of fear and deception.

4. The entire season did a good job of occluding its trajectory. This last episode does that at an even finer, more detailed level. None of us see this coming. Not even the Underwoods.

5. This is a pretty rote commentary on power, chaos, fear, etc... But it is really well crafted and delivered. The last two seasons did nothing for me. This one - boy howdy that was a good ending. The failure of anyone in the room to understand Arabic, which leads to the death of the hostage, is another little Zizekian detail that ties it all together.

Around that same point. I just realized I wasn't invested or entertained.

They decided to pile on narrative incident, but little of it is interesting. Part of it is a sense of the been-there, done-that (it's a shame that they didn't really go all-in on a WWIII type of scenario to differentiate things), part of it is that this season isn't very good at the posturing that made this show fun.

Throughout its run, “House of Cards” committed the ultimate sin: The series presented itself as a savvy look at the dark heart of national politics, when actually it was a wildly naive conspiracy story that only worked by making Frank Underwood’s (Spacey) opponents too dumb to catch him.

And more...

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'House of Cards' employees allege sexual harassment, assault by Kevin Spacey
Kevin Spacey made the set of Netflix's "House of Cards" into a "toxic" work environment through a pattern of sexual harassment, eight people who currently work on the show or worked on it in the past tell CNN. One former employee told CNN that Spacey sexually assaulted him.
The former production assistant, whose account has never previously been disclosed, told CNN that Spacey sexually assaulted him during one of the show's early seasons. All eight people, each of whom spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions for speaking out, described Spacey's behavior as "predatory," saying it included nonconsensual touching and crude comments and targeted production staffers who were typically young and male. . . .
CNN, November 2

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I mentioned on Facebook that recent turns in American politics just killed my appetite for politically themed television (Madam Secretary, Designated Survivor), not that I had been heavy into any of them.

I watched all the previous seasons of House of Cards, but I remember scenes more than storylines, so I felt somewhat lost looking at the Season 7 premiere. I mean, Robin Wright is always great, but...

Is anyone still watching?

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I totally lost interest about the middle of last season. I kind of wanted to check this season out because I've been convinced for a while that the real MVP of the show is Robin Wright, but I haven't been able to muster the interest (or the time).

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I watched the new season (it's actually Season 6), which was thankfully shorter than the others (only eight episodes), but... well, it *feels* like something that was written in a rush when they had to junk the storylines they had already started producing and had to come up with something new. Everything gets sillier and sillier as Claire Hale Underwood goes the full Michael Corleone. It's a little like watching The Godfather Part III and its papal-assassination conspiracy-theory-mongering and trying to remember how it all started out as the story of an orphaned boy who came to America and turned to crime simply to stick up for his neighbours...